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Just Plain Weird Stories

Myth: Spiders can lay their eggs under human skin in wounds created by their bites.

Fact: In a surprisingly widespread urban legend, a nameless woman is bitten by a spider (usually on her cheek) while on vacation. She later develops a swelling, from which, in due course, baby spiders emerge! Somehow or other, the venom must have transformed into eggs. Spiders, need I say, do not find the human body a suitable site for egglaying, and no actual case anything like this can be found anywhere in scientific or medical literature.

That is, unless you count as scientific literature the book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field by Nobel Prize chemist Kary Mullis. In one chapter, Mullis claims to have been bitten by a brown recluse spider in California (where no such spiders exist), that other spiders came back to feed on the resulting wound, and that female brown recluses feed their babies from such wounds. All this is sheer fantasy. As the name implies, real recluse spiders avoid humans like the plague if at all possible.

Myth: "Hedge apples" (Osage orange fruit) or horse chestnuts can be used to repel spiders.

Large Osage orange fruit Maclura pomifera © 2002 Steve Baskauf

Fact: The story that the fruit of the Osage orange tree (also called hedge apple, monkey ball, or spider ball) can repel or ward off spiders turns out to be extremely widespread in Midwestern states, where the trees are common. Details vary, but in general it seems that people put these aromatic fruits around their walls in fall to "keep spiders from coming in." Since house spiders don't actually come in from outside, of course this works just fine, but there is no evidence that spiders are repelled by osage-oranges. They live on the trees and even make webs on the fallen fruit. What's more, spiders seldom show any sign of being able to detect airborne odors!

In some versions of the story, the repellent effect has been transferred from spiders to cockroaches, mosquitoes, chicken mites, or mice. Since squirrels regularly chew through these fruits to get the tasty seeds inside, a rodent repellent effect seems pretty unlikely.

In the Pacific Northwest, where Osage oranges are seldom seen, the legend has been transferred to horse chestnuts. I like horse chestnuts and usually have some around, but still have plenty of spiders, so I know of my own experience that this doesn't work.

A correspondent in British Columbia has heard a version of the myth in which the spiders are repelled by copper pennies!

Text © 2005, Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, University of Washington, Box 353010, Seattle, WA 98195, USA Phone: 206-543-5590 Photos © as credited

Queries to Spider Myths author, Rod Crawford This page last updated 12 May, 2005 This site best viewed at 800 x 600 using IE 5.0 or above.